Top 3 Challenges of Implementing ABM in Salesforce

Salesforce is incredibly powerful, but it wasn’t built with account-based marketing in mind. That’s why, when it comes to implementing ABM strategies in your organization, Salesforce’s out-of-the-box tools may not be enough.

Here’s where Lane Four comes in: It’s the missing link to make your Salesforce org ABM-ready. Lane Four’s suite of tools address the following 3 challenges of implementing ABM strategies in Salesforce.

Lead-to-Account Matching

Every single lead that comes into your organization is packed with a smorgasbord of information—you have the contact info, account info, geographic info, and so on. As your lead database expands, the oversight you have over your records has to keep pace as well.
It’s not uncommon for a team to run across hundreds—maybe thousands—of leads in a single week. With so many new leads coming in, it’s easy for reps to lose track of important ones. The last thing you want is your reps to be so bombarded by information that those key leads get dumped into Salesforce and end up going nowhere.

With Lane Four’s powerful lead-to-account matching tools, this isn’t a problem—the ability to match records is what we do best. Lane Four will find all potential matches in your Salesforce instance, including fuzzy name matches and domain matches. Once a lead is matched, automation can be set up to give the lead a score if a particular field matches a similar field on the account. Plus, missing data on matched leads can be filled in with account data to eliminate any ambiguity. All of this ensures that that reps have a simple way of knowing which leads to target within an account.

Other solutions do this outside of Salesforce, usually in a server locked off from the organization administrator. But, because Lane Four is 100% native to Salesforce, it lets you make the most of the tools you already have and can administer yourself. Eliminating the need for a third-party application means you utilize the admin features already at your disposal while ensuring your data is secure.

Account-Based Lead Routing

Once a lead has been matched with an account, it need to be routed to the correct SDR, BDR, account executive or account team. You want that lead to be assigned to the person or team who already owns the account, and not to a random rep, who may not have any idea what’s happening with that account. But with so many leads pouring in daily, it becomes impossible to assign all of them manually.

Lane Four’s round robin rules take the manual work out of the assignment process. Round robin assignment eliminates the tedium out of assigning leads, and turns to a model based upon automation. How you decide to automate your round robins is completely up to you. You can map leads to territories according to regional factors such as postal codes, or company information, such as the number of employees. Using matched account data increases the chance that the lead gets to the right person at the right time.

Account Visibility

With other matching tools, matching a lead to an account means populating a custom field on the lead with the matched account’s name. This approach is much too simplistic—it doesn’t benefit the visibility you have into a target account whatsoever. Reps need the ability to see which leads are associated with their accounts, without having to perform searches or create reports.

Our solution to this is to put all matching data associated with a record right on that record’s page—this includes leads, contacts, and accounts. For example, a lead page would have four different tables: Matched accounts, duplicate contacts, duplicate and related leads. With Lane Four, you’re able to get an at-a-glance view at the overall account activity—at the account level.

With Lane Four, you can be sure that you’re giving your sales reps the best chance at qualifying leads quickly, without having to figure out manual lead matching and assignment in Salesforce. Let our software do the work and let your business and sales team scale gracefully.